\n<\/p>\n
K<\/span>esha Sebert has described her sixth album . (referred to hereafter as Period) as \u201cthe first album I\u2019ve made where I felt truly free\u201d. It comes accompanied by a lengthy world tour, advertised by a photo in which the singer expresses her freedom \u2013 in what you have to say is a very Kesha-like manner \u2013 by riding a jetski while topless. Long-term observers of her turbulent career may note that this doesn\u2019t seem so different from the way she framed her third album, 2017\u2019s Rainbow, which she described at the time as \u201ctruly saving my life\u201d, and featured her on the cover naked and was accompanied by a tour called Fuck the World.<\/p>\n <\/span>Kesha: . (Period)<\/span> Photograph: AP<\/p>\n But it would be remiss to deny her the ability to make a similar point again. Rainbow was released at the height of her legal battle with her former producer \u201cDr\u201d Luke Gottwald. Kesha had accused him of sexual assault and other allegations, which he denied, resulting in a series of lawsuits and countersuits. Although alternative producers were found to work on Rainbow, she was still legally obliged to release the album \u2013 and its two successors \u2013 on Gottwald\u2019s Kemosabe label. The two reached a settlement in 2023, her contract with Kemosabe expired shortly afterwards, and Period is now released on her own label.<\/p>\n While Rainbow and its immediate follow-ups regularly mined the legal disputes and resulting trauma for lyrical inspiration \u2013 a dramatic shift from the screw-you hedonism that powered her big hits in the early 2010s \u2013 Period signals a fresh start by, more or less, bringing back the Kesha who boasted about brushing her teeth with Jack Daniel\u2019s and took to the stage accompanied by dancers dressed as giant penises. Only the piano ballad closer Cathedral seems entirely rooted in recent events \u2013 \u201cLife was so lethal \u2026 I died in the hell so I could start living again\u201d. Elsewhere, the occasional hint of something dark in the author\u2019s past (\u201cI earned the right to be like this\u201d) is drowned out by the sound of Kesha reverting to type in no uncertain terms: \u201ctake me to the sex shop\u201d, \u201cbartender pour me up some damn fluid\u201d, \u201cI like chaos, dripping head to toe\u201d, \u201cgimme gimme gimme all the boys\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n And who can blame her? No one wants to be defined by trauma, and she\u2019s doubtless keen to assert that the original Kesha persona was more to do with her than the svengali-like producer who discovered her.<\/p>\n Furthermore, it\u2019s a weirdly timely return. In 2010, Kesha\u2019s hot mess persona made her an outlier, albeit an outlier whose debut single TiK ToK sold 14m digital copies worldwide. The critic Simon Reynolds smartly noted that if the era\u2019s predominant female star Lady Gaga saw her work as high-concept art-pop in a lineage that included David Bowie and Roxy Music, Kesha was more like their glam-era rival Alice Cooper. Fifteen years on, we live in a pop world at least partly defined by Charli xcx\u2019s last album. Perpetually half-cut and lusty, open about her messy failings (\u201cI like the bizarre type, the lowlife \u2026 God, I love a hopeless bastard,\u201d she sings of her taste in men on Red Flag), Kesha could make a fair claim to be a godmother of Brat. Certainly, you couldn\u2019t accuse her of jumping on a latter-day trend, just as Period\u2019s diversion into vogue-ish country-pop, Yippee-Ki-Yay, seems less craven than it might. Kesha has done past work in that area \u2013 from her 2013 Pitbull collaboration Timber to her duet with Dolly Parton on Rainbow.<\/p>\n Yippee-Ki-Yay\u2019s country-facing sound sits among a buffet of current pop styles: there\u2019s synthy, 80s-leaning pop-rock you could imagine Taylor Swift singing on Delusional and Too Hard, and mid-tempo disco on Love Forever, while the spectre of hyperpop haunts the warp-speed Boy Crazy and Hudson Mohawke turns up glitchy Auto-Tune-heavy electro on Glow. It\u2019s an album clearly intended to re-establish Kesha at the heart of pop, which means there\u2019s no room for the appealing weirdness of her 2023 single Eat the Acid, and it\u2019s only on the closing Cathedral that her voice really shifts into the full-throttle roar she unleashed covering T Rex\u2019s Children of the Revolution at 2022\u2019s Taylor Hawkins tribute concert.<\/p>\n That said, the songs are all really strong, filled with smart little twists and drops, and funny, self-referential lines: \u201cYou\u2019re on TikTok \/ I\u2019m the fucking OG.\u201d You get the sense of the massed ranks of collaborators \u2013 including everyone from regular Father John Misty foil Jonathan Wilson to Madison Love, who counts Blackpink and Addison Rae among her songwriting clients \u2013 really getting behind her to make Period a success. Kesha, meanwhile, plays the part of Kesha 1.0 to perfection: for all the lurid lyrical excesses, it never feels as if she\u2019s trying too hard. And why would it: she\u2019s returning to a role she originated.<\/p>\n Lathe of Heaven \u2013 Aurora<\/strong><\/p>\n Cognitive dissonance: Lathe of Heaven look weirdly like a new wave of British heavy metal band, but Aurora\u2019s sound is equal parts smeary shoegazing and epic early 80s synth-pop. Great song regardless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Kesha Sebert has described her sixth album . (referred to hereafter as Period) as \u201cthe first album I\u2019ve made where I felt truly free\u201d. It comes accompanied by a lengthy world tour, advertised by a photo in which the singer expresses her freedom \u2013 in what you have to say is a very Kesha-like manner<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9989,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[2702,2703,2704,2701,2221,2705,1007,1085,646],"class_list":{"0":"post-9988","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-funny","9":"tag-hedonistic","10":"tag-hotmess","11":"tag-kesha","12":"tag-period","13":"tag-persona","14":"tag-return","15":"tag-review","16":"tag-smart"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}This week Alexis listened to<\/h2>\n